Reconciling different travel styles in group trips Upgraded to Economy, July 13, 2024August 10, 2024 So you’ve found a group of travelers who want to embark on the same journey as you and you’ve all booked a trip together. Congratulations! But once you set out, you realize you’re going to be with these people either all or most of the time until the end of the trip. Everyone has their own idiosyncrasies and styles of traveling. While every person is different, it doesn’t mean we should not take trips as groups. What should we do? Vet and discuss ahead of time The most important thing to do ahead of time is to make rough plans and determine how intense the itinerary is expected to be. Everyone should agree on the fundamentals. That being said, there’s no way to know every single idiosyncrasy about somebody until you simply take a trip. If you’re unsure how well you’ll vibe with someone before the trip, you don’t have to take a huge leap of faith. I discussed in a previous post about taking “trial trips”. Rather than immediately embarking on an international trip to Japan with someone you barely know, try a day trip to a neighboring city. This way, you don’t have to make any reservations at hotels, and if things go south, you can end it early and cut your losses. Empathy is key… Everybody’s bodies are made different, and travel can be exhausting. If your group travelers don’t want to do the same thing as you (or even more pertinently, if they are not capable of doing the same thing as you), it’s not a good idea to push them past their limits. If you cannot stand that, it’s probably not a great idea to take a group trip with those people. Going with people for whom you do not have empathy is a recipe for a disastrous group trip. …but set a certain baseline of requirements Having empathy does not mean you have to be okay with going on a trip with every single person you know. Either you can decide to compromise or you can determine that competing sets of priorities are a dealbreaker for this trip, and based on that, you can decide to proceed forward with or change your group composition. From my experience, here are a few important baseline requirements that people might forget to discuss before the trip but you should not forget to determine: How long will each travel day be? How early are we going to wake up each day? How late will we be staying out? Are we going to any bars or stay out late? If so, are we concerned about our safety? Are we the kind of travelers to take red-eye and early morning flights or do we prefer daytime flights? What’s our budget for eating out? How much physical activity will we be doing? (If not renting a car:) Are we going to be taking rideshares everywhere or public transit? (If sharing a hotel room together:) What’s everyone’s bedtime routines like, and when does everyone wake up? Do we need to wear earplugs and eyemasks? Do we shower in the morning or evening? A Tale of Two Travel Buddies This tale of two travel buddies involves me, and two other friends, whom I’ll refer to as Friend A and Friend B. One of them is my best friend and another is a very close friend. I usually take trips with one or the other, but not with both at the same time. Nonetheless, I always enjoy traveling with both of them. In my experiences, I found a few key differences between traveling between the two. Friend A and I insist on waking up late. We’d much prefer naturally waking up than to be awoken by the unwelcome sound of an alarm. We are very much opposed to opening the blinds to let the sunshine beam into our room(s) at 8am. Friend B prefers the hustle and bustle of packed days with strenuous physical activities, such as hiking and climbing. Conversely, Friend A and I prefer to take it slow. That doesn’t mean we don’t do a lot each day—it just means we’re not going to be in a rush for every single activity. Friend B once told me about his group hiking trip where they made breakfast at their Airbnb, ate, and washed the dishes all within the span of one hour, apparently with surgical precision and no time wasted. I’m confident Friend A and I would not be able to do that because it’d be too stressful for us. Friend A is opposed to red-eyes and early morning flights. Friend B and I have done several early morning flights together. Friend B will do redeyes when he’s traveling alone. I am somewhere in the middle between Friend A and B on this one. While I am generally not a fan of red-eyes and early morning flights, I will do them with Friend B if necessary. When I book flights with Friend A, we never discuss early morning or redeye flights. These idiosyncrasies significantly influence how I plan my trips with them. While they have met each other before, it’s only when I’m on a trip with one of them visiting the other’s city of residence. For all intents and purposes, I have not taken a trip simultaneously with them and I don’t think it would be a good fit. That all being said, it doesn’t make me dislike taking trips with one or the other. It just means the trips with one friend will be different from the other. To add another layer to this, there are several more idiosyncrasies unique to me that I only do on solo trips. I probably would not do these things with either of these friends: I like to cover a wide variety of places in one trip. I am fine with taking multiple flights throughout a trip, switching cities every few days. I am not afraid of making very complicated plans to save money or to try something unique, such as flying to Burlington, VT and renting a car to drive up to Montréal instead of flying to Montréal directly, or flying out of a certain airport so I can try a good lounge there. I like going to places outside of the United States and/or that don’t speak English very much, rarely visited by foreign visitors, because they are more exciting to me and I find the extra challenge of being in a foreign country or a different culture fun. For example, I really enjoy visiting Québec even though it is harder for me to go there and to speak in French. Hopefully, this tale eludicates the nuances of taking trips with your friends. Remember, life happens I’ve had many planned trips that never ended up happening. I’ve also had several trips where someone dropped out after initial planning because of an unforeseen event. While it’s pretty unacceptable for someone to ditch last-minute because they suddenly don’t want to go, we should understand that life happens and there’s no way to compel someone to come on a trip, especially if the circumstances preventing them from attending are beyond their control. Financially, there is a pretty straightforward rule for dealing with people dropping out of trips. Almost universally (from a poll I conducted of travelers), people agree that if someone intended to come but can no longer attend a trip, that person should still pay their fair share; the burden should not lie upon the others who are still going. To avoid this becoming a problem, the person paying for the accommodations/airfare/etc. needs to collect the money from each trip participant ahead of time. I’ve made the mistake before of not collecting payment first, and when the friend pulled out of the trip and refused to pay for his fair share, the rest of us who did go ended up having to pay extra to cover his part. To this day, it remains a blemish on our friendship. 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